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Lost Arrow Campground: A Spooky Short Fiction Story for the Campfire

It was about 9:00 pm and both driver and passenger were starting to nod off. They were keeping an eye out for campground signs and pulled over at two different ones. But was a Saturday night and neither had any space left to set up, so they moved on.

Aura, Raoul, and their dog named Chicken had been moving from one campground to the next to see the country and explore the great outdoors. That sort of lifestyle would be spontaneous enough for most people, but these adventurous three had fallen into a comfortable routine after six months and needed to switch things up a bit.

So on this particular day, they had decided to drive their Jeep and pop-up camper until they could drive no more and then look for campground signs along the highway. It was a hot, muggy day in late August, and they had made it as far as Oklahoma. This was a particularly long stretch of road that they were looking to get through as quickly as possible.

A few miles later, they saw a sign that read, “Lost Arrow Campground.” That sounded just fine, considering it was almost 11 pm and a thick fog was starting to roll in.

They pulled into Lost Arrow and saw a small shack at the front. Understandably, there was no one working at this time of night, so they decided to just set up and check in and pay in the morning. Camper set-up went quickly, and the couple divvied up the last tasks of the day. Aura took Chicken out for her last walk of the day, and Raoul went to a nearby utility sink to wash dishes from their on-the-road dinner.

As typical, Aura was distracted on her dog walk and texting her best friend, Michelle, about their exhausting journey to spontaneity. She was looking down at her glowing iPhone when BAM! She walked into a towering beast of a man with a huge belly, bounced right off of it, and fell backwards into the gravel. Meanwhile, Chicken, who was always alert-to-a-fault and way too social, didn’t even respond to the fat man that was in their way. The pup had only been startled by Aura’s fall, nothing more.

Stunned and shaken up a bit, Aura brushed herself off and picked herself up off the ground, still holding on to Chicken’s leash. Feeling paranoid and a bit frantic, she rubbed her eyes and whipped her head in either direction. There was no one there. No one to apologize for being fat and in the way, no one to give her a helping hand out of the gravel, and no one to explain why she had bounced back so violently. Exhausted and unwilling to think about it anymore, Aura and Chicken made their way back to the camper to settle in for the night.

Meanwhile, Raoul was behind an old rickety shed hovering over a large sink with a few dirty bowls and spoons. He turned on the water without really looking at it and it instantly felt thicker than any water ever should – even campground water. It was pitch black outside, and his headlamp battery was becoming dim. The water coming out of the faucet was red, blood red. Instead of feeling alarmed, he was just angry. He had grown weary of life on the road and all the shitty accommodations along the way. For a brief second, the thought crossed Raoul’s mind that it could be blood, but he blamed his headlamp, his tiredness, and his color blindness and didn’t get it a second thought.

Back at the camper, Aura and Raoul were too tired and cranky to even get into their respective stories about what had happened on their separate outings. Instead they just crawled under the covers and tried to forget about what just happened.

That’s when they noticed that a smell was starting to creep in. It smelled rancid, pungent, and unlike anything they’d ever smelled before. Over the past six months, they had camped next to landfills, pig farms, and Appalachians with serious BO. Yet nothing compared to this smell. It was the smell of rotting flesh, yet they had no idea.

Still hoping to get at least a couple hours of sleep before the sun came up, they closed all the windows, lit a stick of incense, and covered their heads with a blanket. This seemed to work for a little while until the sounds started up.

Moaning sounds echoed through the trees and bounced off the flimsy canvas covering that separate the inside world from the outside one…and the familiar one from the hauntingly strange one on the other side.

Heavy duty earplugs helped to muffle the moaning sounds better than nothing, and before long, the birds were chirping and the first glimpses of sunlight peeked out onto the horizon. Aura, Raoul, and Chicken weren’t entirely sure where they were, but they just knew they wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and get back on the road.

Still angry at having stumbled upon yet another disappointing campground, Raoul started packing up. In her usual stubborn way, Aura refused to help and insisted that they go check in at the front office to pay first. They already had an outstanding citation for failure to pay at a campground in Pennsylvania, and the last thing they needed to add to the mix was more legal trouble. The couple went back and forth in a passive-aggressive fashion until Raoul finally threw his hands in the air and gave in just to keep the peace.

The three of them stepped outside the camper and started making their way to the front office to pay for the night’s stay before packing up. There was a low-lying fog that blanketed the ground and hovered about three feet high in all directions. Chicken seemed to disappear in the fog as they walked towards the shack along the road. There were no other campers or tents in sight, which was a bit odd, but not entirely unheard of.

When they arrived, they found no one…only an abandoned, dilapidated shack with splintered wood and broken windows. There was no sign designating the business as Lost Arrow Campground and no pay box in sight. So they gladly accepted that this terrible night was at least a free night of camping and started walking back to the pop-up to take down and move out.

At that moment, the blanket of fog was just starting to lift. And what was under the fog began to reveal itself.

Tombstones. Gravesites. Corpses. Everywhere. And in all directions.

The real Lost Arrow Campground was up the road another half mile, and they just hadn’t gone far enough. Aura, Raoul, and Chicken had just camped overnight in a cemetery.

The residents were none too pleased about it, and they weren’t about to let them get away with a free night of camping for nothing. Mangled limbs began to claw their way out of mounds of dirt, and there was nowhere to run.